Energy Apps: Good digital tools mean empowerment, not just for customers. A mini series.
Part 1 — The basics
I talk about how strong brands can raise their standing with their customers by empowering them all the time. The Energy Sector is poised for rapid digital innovation.
There are three main areas of impact for consumer-based software innovation in the energy sector:
Brand elevation for energy companies via customer empowerment
Encourage short and long term changes through gamification, facilitating the gradual infrastructure updates dictated by green energy innovation
Richer data for improved predictions around supply, maintenance and development
Energy supply continues to become more decentralised through investments into solar and wind, both at home and at scale. This involves changes in the grid infrastructure as well as shifts in consumer demands. The decision factors for customers to decide which supplier they choose have gotten more complex.
This three part series covers: (1) The neglected foundational needs of customers, (2) Genuine innovations for customer empowerment and (3) Blue sky ideas for the near-futurists.
The basic features that should “just work” — and often do not
Expectations around how technology allows me to engage with businesses are higher than ever. Software needs to move at the speed of thought. If I can think it quickly, I must be able to solve it just as quickly. Enter thoughtful design and development.
Input meter data — The way all customers will interact with their energy supplier. While it’s shocking how often creating an actually simple interface to input data is done badly, the real impact lies deeper. How will the software use the input data? Immediately show me how my usage is compared to my monthly pre-payment bill adapted to average use in the time of year and allow me to decide whether to pay an additional difference or not — this incentivises customers to input data often. If it doesn’t take time of year into account and automatically charges the user without their ability to stop the payment nor properly warning them they will make a payment. Unbelievably, this is how the Octopus App currently works. So the customer is incentivised not to input their meter readings regularly. (And they lose trust in the company, engaging minimally with the app and not discovering any potentially good and helpful features).
Control and clear understanding over my contracts — how are prices developing? How is my expected vs actual usage? Are there, even within the same provider, other options that would benefit me? Based on my data, are there contractual optimisations I don’t know about? Answering questions like these pro-actively vastly increases the perceived trust of my provider, making them appear less like a faceless corporate entity and more like a business of individuals. These features can increase marketing effectiveness, decrease customer service requests and increase performance of sales strategies.
Understanding of costs — these can sometimes be complex and make it difficult for customers to act accordingly. Pricing can act as incentive both in short term and long term, but only if it is understood. Does my pricing vary based on time of day/week or weather? If it does, are there tips of how to take advantage of this? Can I set up notifications in order to take advantage of these incentives?
Past use data — how has my use of utilities changed over time? How do these changes relate to other existing data. Relating to weather and learning about it’s impacts are interesting for consumers. How changes to family setup (birth, children moving out etc) impact are also insightful. An incentive to make investments into insulation, more efficient devices etc. should be trackable as well, to encourage more impact.
Problem resolution — A phone call can be reassuring to a person in need (if the call centre employee is good at their job). But describing an issue only in words is not always the best approach. Utilising both live conversations and the cameras and sensors of smartphones (and potential IoT gadgets) offer a much richer assessment. Once the acute assessment it complete, live status updates in an app can reassure customers that progress is being made, thus decreasing the follow up calls. Beyond that, there are also resolutions that customers can safely take into their own hands (especially the administrative kind) so providing features to trouble shoot and resolve themselves increases perception of helpfulness and transparency, while also decreasing the load on customer service.
In the next article in this series, we go beyond the direct interaction to what can be done with data and how that benefits both customers and the business.